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Do your window covers block out the cold? It turns out that horizontal blinds work pretty well, especially if you tilt the rails downwards, so that they open towards the floor, a bit like the feathers on a bird.

I used to think that it would be best to have the opening upwards, as I thought it would reduce the coldness falling from the window into the room. But it turns out that the bigger issue is to prevent warm air from inside the room from falling onto the window in the first place. Angling the rails down stops cold air circulating – a bit like feathers on a bird.

I took some thermal images to test this theory. I chose a cold night of about minus four degrees Celsius outside, after our heater had been on for several hours, so it was about 20 degrees inside.

The following pictures show a series of close-ups in the same mid-section of the blinds. The thermal scale is the same in each picture, so you can compare the impact of tilting the rails. In these photos, blue and green are cold, and white is warmer than red.

The rails are tilted down in the first picture, which is the right way to do it. Here are some close ups. When the rails are angled down, there is a lot of white, quite a bit of red, and no green or blue. Rails tilted down stops cold air from circulating out from the centre of the blind.

In the next pictures, the rails are tilted upwards. There is less white and more red here. The blinds are still stopping a lot of the warm air leaking out the house, but not as much as when the rails are pointed down.

And in case you are thinking that maybe the blinds don’t do much at all, have a look at them when they are open. The heat loss is huge, with glaring great blue-cold glass leaking the warmth out right away. I could really feel it too, when I opened the blinds and the room felt colder right away.

It’s also worth thinking about the whole blinds. The photo from further back shows that there is still some coldness down at the bottom. These blinds would work even better if I could seal off the base, but I haven’t worked out how to do that yet.

Last night four young people in my care braved minus 4°C temperatures to camp out in the back paddock. They slept in a 17 year old large two-season dome tent with netting rather than nylon walls, plus a fly.

Despite their good mattresses, many sleeping bags and hats, I fretted during the night. Would I wake to find four icicles instead of four kids?

Curious, and paranoid, I wandered down to check on their status, through the morning frost when temperatures were just hitting zero. All had slept and woken safely and complained only of cold feet.

The thermal imaging camera tells the tale of the icy tent and warm kids.

Here’s the tent, before I have opened it up. The thermal image shows that some heat is escaping through the zipper and seams. Parts of the fly are warming up in the sun. then there are super warm patches where cold toes push against the end of the tent. All in all, the temperature in the tent looks much warmer than outside.

Once we open the tent, heat starts pouring out. Now we can see the full story of the cold feet. I ask the one on the left if it seems cold up near his head and he confirms it. That’s the dark blue patch on the left, inside the tent.

I ask the two on the right and their heads pop up – still with their hats on, and there it is. Their faces are positively warm compared with the top of the doonas and sleeping bags which have done their job well. Very little heat is coming off the kids bodies.So are the kids warm?

So, we wake to four safe, mostly warm people. Next time we’ll add another mat and doona to their feet.

Chicken butchering is a conflicting experience for me. I am gratified that I can kill a chicken when needed. I’m satisfied when I turn it into food. I am also distressed that I can take another life. My belief in sustainable food production wins out, and I try hard to turn chickens I can no longer keep into food for the table.

Until recently, it was touch-and-go whether my dead chooks made it to the table, or were buried as compost. So here are my secrets for tipping the balance in favour of the table.

First – why do I kill chickens? I don’t just kill them after they stop laying eggs, but instead allow them to retire for as long as they stay healthy and happy. But eventually they get , and it is cruel to keep them alive. I bury my old, sick ones in the ground. But I also keep a rooster, and breed chicks each season. Somehow I always end up with more young roosters than new hens.

If you’ve ever tried to keep a whole lot of roosters together with hens you’ll know it doesn’t work. They’ll fight each other constantly, drawing blood and causing distress, and they fight over then hens and make the whole flock miserable. So keeping roosters, and raising chicks inevitably means killing young, healthy birds, which are brilliant part of sustainable food production.

It all adds up to killing about 2-5 roosters in a batch, once a year, and putting down another couple of birds at odd times. Today I butchered four young roosters, and was only mildly traumatised.

In summary, I use “the broomstick method” to kill, and then skin, rather than plucking. There’s virtually no blood, no feathers and no noise. These features make it possible for me to get the job done well by myself, without a lot of skill, experience, preparation or time.

Get prepared

First, recognise that you need to be quite determined and focused to kill a living animal, and turn it into food. Some of the tasks need strength, others need great care and some feel unnatural. Prepare yourself mentally before you begin.

Starving a bird for at least 14 hours makes gutting easy. If you can’t easily separate the target birds, remove the food from the whole flock the night before. In the morning, the others can wait for breakfast, and knowing your other chickens are hungry will help keep you on track too. The added bonus is the roosters may be cross enough to come up and peck at you, making them easy to catch.

Work out what you are going to do with the leftover feathers, guts and other leftover bits. I bury mine in the garden, so I dig a hole first.

Here’s my set-up:

Outside and out of sight of the hen-house, target birds

Make up a processing area including a sharp knife with a pointed end, a cutting board and large, clean kitchen bowl big enough to hold finished chicken. An optional extra is a pair of bone-scissors.

Hang a hook above your head height, within easy reach of the cutting board, and with a large bucket underneath, and twine to tie the bird up by its feet. I use a piece from a hay bale.

A broom, rake or other long, wooden-handled implement somewhere nearby.

A hose with a strong jet nearby to clean the bird before taking it inside.

Inside, in the kitchen

Another chopping board and knife, near the sink.

Adjacent to that, glad wrap and a clean bag for each bird.

Honour the bird

An important step for me personally is to honour the bird and its short life and sacrifice. I hold each bird for a while, talking with it about its life, and what I’ve loved about it. I tell it I’m sorry that I can’t keep it alive, explain why and tell it to look at the beautiful world around. This process gets me centred and ready, and maybe even helps the bird too, as it always relaxes in my arms. We are both very relaxed for the next bit, and I keep talking until I have worked up a clear, calm determination to carry through with the whole job.

Use the Broomstick Method

I learned the broomstick method from a Backyard Poultry fact sheet on How to kill a chicken for food. It’s mentioned in just one short paragraph copied here, with some extra tips of my own below:

“Lay the chicken on the ground, holding the tail and legs together, and gently rest a broomstick across the neck behind the head. This doesn’t hurt the chicken until the last second, when you place your feet on the broomstick to either side of the head and pull the chicken’s body swiftly upward. Done properly, this remains a quick and clean method, as the blood drains into the gap between vertebrae and remains inside the skin until the head is cut off.”

My extra tips are:

The correct hold is high up on the feathered part of the legs so that you can also pull the tail down and hold it together with both legs in your dominant hand. This hold confuses the chicken, and it will stop thinking about you, and stretch its body out, while staying pretty still and making it easy to get into position.

Lie the bird’s chin on the ground, then put the broomstick across the back of its head, right up against its skull. Stand with both feet on the broomstick, one on either side of its head.

Minimise distress to the bird by working quickly with the right force, speed and angle.

Force and speed depend on the bird’s condition. Don’t be too quick or strong with an old, sick bird or you could accidentally pull its head right off. Go quite hard and fast for a strong, young rooster.

For the right angle, use both hands and start down between your legs so that the bird is stretched out, then flick forward as if you were ten-pin bowling or throwing a softball. At the end of the movement the bird’s body is across the top of its head at a hard angle, and you’ll hear a small noise, which is not as clean as a pop or a snap, but is still a definite bone-and-gristle noise.

You can tell you have succeeded because the bird will immediately flap as a reflex action. Usually it will flap about 10-20 times very hard, then hang still, and then flap again a few more times in shorter bursts. Its legs will move a bit at this time too, but its head will hang down loosely.

There are three parts to a bird…..

Think of the bird as having in inside, an outside and the meat and bones in the middle.

The outside includes the feathers, head, tail, feet etc. You need to remove all of these outside bits before you can eat your chicken.

The inside is the guts and organs, all in a big, strong cavity inside the ribs and between the back and breastbone. There are two tubes at the top, and one coming out of the bottom, and they are all connected together. The goal of ‘gutting’ is to remove all of the inside bits in one big piece, without puncturing the digestive tract, which is a continuous tube from mouth-to-cloaca. The cloaca by the way, is the ‘pooh hole’, and also the ‘egg hole’ (or rooster equivalent), which is the only opening in the back end of a bird. If you’ve starved your bird overnight, there’ll be enough room on the inside for all of those parts, and your hand as well, which is what you’ll use to pull the insides out.

Once you have removed the outside and the inside bits, you are left with the foody part in the middle. The skin is in between the feathery outside, and the good bits in the middle and can be treated either as part of either. Pluck the chicken if you want to eat the skin, or skin it as an easier alternative.

Skinning

Learning to skin a bird was the turning point for me between reliably turning chickens into food, or usually burying them. Plucking takes more time, makes more mess, and involves some complicated heating and timing. You have to ‘scald’ the bird for a few minutes in hot-but-not-boiling water, so you need a large, clean bucket and new water for each kill (unless you are doing it production style with many on the go at once). Wing feathers and some others are really hard, and I always managed to tear some of it. Do this when you are processing lots of chooks with a bunch of friends, but consider skinning if you are working solo on a small scale.

There are lots of skinning methods explained on-line, but the one I explain here works well, because it minimizes the number of times you move the bird around, and gets the whole process going quickly. Know that the skin is stuck on pretty well, so you need to be firm and determined to pull it off.

While the bird is still flapping, tie its feet tightly together with twine, then hang it upside-down on the hook. It will stay like this until the final steps.

As soon as the bird is hanging still, take hold of its tail, and locate the cloaca. Slice upwards into the tail, without cutting all the way through, then cut towards one side slicing around the cloaca. Keep cutting until you can see open space between the skin and the very end of the digestive tract – inside the bird. What you have to do is to cut all around the outside of the cloaca, without puncturing that tract. The tail and the cloaca will stay together as the end of the ‘inside’ part. Keeping them together makes it easy to keep track of the cloaca so that you don’t puncture it.

While working around the cloaca, start preparing to skin the bird. Think of the skin as a tight-fitting outfit on toddler who wants to keep it on. You’ll be pulling firmly, while keeping in mind the basic shapes (arms and legs) that you are working around, and how each one of them bends. Make a few definite cuts through the skin.

forwards from the cloaca, between the legs and towards the breastbone,

All the way down the front of the bird from breastbone towards the shoulders,

Up the back of the legs towards the feet, pulling the skin off from the muscle as you go. Also cut around each knee, just below where the feathers meet the scales.

Start skinning from top of the leg-feathers, one leg at a time. You may need to do some more careful cutting between the legs once you have stripped them. Skin comes off the belly easily, and is harder on the back, but a firm pull, while loosening with fingers or knife will do it.

For the wings, I recommend cutting them off at the first joint, which means they’ll be shorter than a shop-bought bird. You can try to skin the whole wing, but the feathers are stuck on very tight there. To remove the wing-tips, cut the wing membrane in towards the first-joint elbow, then firmly bend the wing backwards, dislocating the joint. Then you can easily cut through between the ball joints, and then pull the skin off around this bit of wing.

After you’ve skinned the wings, you’ll quickly have the whole skin hanging down over the head. Now you can see that while you’ve been working, nearly all of the blood has settled around the skull, so the meat is nice and white. Don’t worry about getting the skin off the head, but instead cut the neck off up close to the shoulders (this is where the bone-scissors are useful).

Gutting

Take the bird off the hook now, and remove the twine. Also cut off the feet by bending the knee-joint backwards at the end of the ‘drumstick’, and then easily cutting through the tendon.

The trick to gutting is to loosen everything, make as much space as you can, and not puncture the digestive tract. Start by cutting carefully around the windpipe and digestive tract at the neck. Then use your fingers to reach in and loosen the inside from the outside, by running your fingers along between the organs and the ribcage, all around the inside of the shoulders.

Then ensure you have a good hole around the back of the bird up towards the breast. This needs to be large enough to get your whole hand right inside. The insides will already be detached from the breast, but all of the organs will be sticking to the back. As with the neck, just run your hand between the inside and the outside, breaking the connective tissue. While you are doing this, hold the bird above the bucket, gradually easing out the whole inside part. The wing-tips, skin, feathers, head and insides are all in the bucket now, a chicken that looks nearly like a bought one in your hand, and there’s barely a drop of blood spilled anywhere.

Cleaning and storing

Use the hose to clean off any feathers, and the inside of the carcass. Put it in the bowl, and take inside for a final clean-up, and packaging in a plastic bag. Pull the legs and wings in tight, so that it is compact in the fridge. The best option is a vacuum sealer, but I don’t have one, so I tightly glad-wrap all around then put it in a clean plastic bag.

Rigor mortis is the condition where a recently-dead animal becomes stiff for about 48 hours, starting about 20 minutes after death for a chicken. If you cook or freeze a bird in this state it will be very tough. You need to leave it in the fridge for 48 hours so that it becomes tender again, and then either freeze or cook.

Want to see pictures?

I can’t easily work out the ethics of showing this process in pictures. Post a comment if you want photos added to see how it is done.

There’s a lighting revolution underway. You can no longer buy the old incandescent lamps that are still the symbol of a good idea . Instead there’s a bewildering array of alternatives. So which ones should you buy?

Here are the lamps I saw for sale recently at the supermarket. So many options, each with most of the fittings you could want – including the standard screw and bayonet fittings that are still standard in most older houses like mine.

They have a wide range of wattages, lumens, hours and price tags. What does is all mean?

Watts are the amount of power used. The higher the watts, the great the energy being used.

Lumens are the amount of light emitted. The higher the lumens, the brighter the lamp. In some places, like kitchens, we want lots of light. We may want less from our bedside lamp.

Hours of operation differ between lamps. If a lamp lasts for many thousands of hours, you may not have to change it for a decade.

To really understand the price tag, you need to put all of this together. A lamp that uses minimal energy, emits lots of light, and lasts for a decade is cheaper in the long run than one that uses more energy and blows quickly.

LEDs, or light emitting diodes reportedly have the lowest watts per lumen for any lights available in Australia (see the light globe conversion table at the end of this link). A key reason is that they convert electricity into light, and not heat.

I tested this using a thermal imaging camera to compare an old incandescent with a compact fluorescent and LED lamp. Each had been on for half an hour before I tested their temperature.

Thermal image of incandescent lamp

Incandescent lamp

The hottest point on the incandescent lamp was 161 degrees Celsius. That’s a lot of electricity being converted into heat, instead of light.

Thermal image of a compact fluorescent lamp

Compact flourescent lamp

The hottest point on the compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) was 134 degrees Celsius. Still pretty hot.

Thermal image of an LED lamp

LED lamp

The hottest point on the LED lamp was 65 degrees. Most of the power is going into light, not heat.